GS Analyst: Daily Current Affairs

At the 17th Asia and the Pacific Regional Meeting (APRM) of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) in Singapore, international workers’ groups criticised India’s labour policies, including the four new labour codes.

Key discussions in the event: (India-specific)

• India’s new labour codes violate ‘tripartite agreements’ between workers, employers and the government— and give a free hand to employers.

• The power of inspection has been left with employers through the new codes, and it will threaten the tripartite system in the country.
• The ILO chief has urged to focus on the following:
• Recognising persisting skills challenges affecting demand-driven skills development and lifelong learning benefits governments, employers and workers,
• sustainable development,
• Productivity growth and economic prosperity.
• Digital skills, core skills, entrepreneurial skills and soft skills should be better harnessed.
• Focus on the Unorganised sector:
• India has the largest youth population in the world and the country is observing a technological and entrepreneurial boom with start-ups and small businesses mushrooming across the country.
• For ensuring the development of all, measures, like identifying workers in the unorganised sector and prioritising their needs through platforms like the E-Shram portal.
• Extending health coverage through ESIC, are measures to extend universal social security that is leading to a reduction in inequality.

Suggestions:

• Singapore mentioned that lower-wage workers everywhere are disproportionately affected by economic upheavals and high inflation.
• They aim to enhance the government’s approach via the ‘Progressive Wage Model’.
• This approach has helped to raise real income at the 20th percentile of full-time employed residents by 2.7% per annum from 2016 to 2021, compared to the median income growth of 2.1% per annum, helping to reduce the income gap.

What are the present norms for labours in India?

Constitutional Framework:

• Under the Constitution of India, Labour as a subject is in the Concurrent List and, therefore, both the Central and the State governments are competent to enact legislation subject to certain matters being reserved for the Centre.
• Article 14:It provides for equality before the law or equal protection of the laws within the territory of India.
• Article 16:It talks about the right to equal opportunity in matters of public employment.
• Article 39(c): It specifies that the economic system should not result in the concentration of wealth and means of production to the detriment of the entire society.

Judicial Interpretation:

• In the case of Randhir Singh vs Union of India, the Supreme Court stated that even though the principle of ‘Equal pay for Equal work’ is not defined in the Constitution of India, it is a goal which is to be achieved through Articles 14,16 and 39 (c) of the Constitution of India.

Legislative framework: There have been several legislative and administrative initiatives taken by the government to improve working conditions and simplify labour laws. The most recent is the consolidated set of 4 labour codes which are yet to be implemented.

• Code of Wages, 2019
• Industrial Relations Code, 2020
• Social Security Code, 2020
• Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, 2020
• The implementation process is delayed as states are yet to finalise their rules under these codes.

What were the reforms introduced by the Government?

• The new codes have thrown light on the role of an "Inspector-cum-Facilitator" who has the responsibility of checking for compliance as well as facilitating businesses in achieving that compliance.
  • The "facilitator" role seems to be a new element and this role could clash with the traditional responsibilities of an "inspector".
• This would enable companies to introduce arbitrary service conditions for their workers.

Do they justify the demands of Labours in India?

The laws aim to solve a few issues, however, left out include;

• Gig workers
• Small Start-ups and Informal Sectors Left-out From Social Security Coverage
• Migrant workers, self-employed workers, home-based workers, and other vulnerable groups in rural areas are not covered under social security benefits.
• Non-Inclusion of Charitable or Non-Profit Based Establishment

Recent Government Initiatives:

• Unique Labour Identification Number (LIN) allotted to all labour for maintaining data records.
• ESI Coverage has been extended to Construction workers in the implemented area. Construction site Workers have been covered to avail benefits under the ESI Scheme from 1st August 2015.

According to the maritime vessel-tracking portal marinetraffic.com, Chinese vessel ‘Yuan Wang 5’ has re-entered the Indian Ocean, which is seen as a surveillance move by China.

Background:

• The Chinese presence in the Indian Ocean began in 2008 as piracy operations in the Gulf of Aden and has since maintained continuous presence in the region, even deploying nuclear attack submarines (SSN), on occasions.
• Yuan Wang-5 entered Indian Ocean last year for similar reasons.

The Chinese vessel ‘Yuan Wanh-5’:

• Yuan Wang 5 is the Chinese marine research, satellite and ballistic missile vessel.
• It is currently mapping Indian Ocean bed 2000 kilometres (1100 nautical miles) south of Sri Lanka giving rise to the possibility of Beijing exploring a new sea route to Africa’s eastern seaboard by bypassing contested Malacca, Sunda, and Lombok Straits.

China-Sri Lanka Agreement: (Reason for China’s presence in Indian Ocean)

• The strategic ship has become a bone of contention between India and China after the concerns over the vessel being allowed to berth at Hambantota port by the Sri Lankan President.
• The Hambantota Port was leased to China for 99 years in 2017 by the then Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe in a debt for equity swap as Sri Lanka had defaulted on the Chinese loan.
• The vessel left Hambantota on August 22 after Sri Lankans replenished the ship with food, diesel, oil, and lubricants.

India’s concern:

• Planned Tests: The vessel entered into the Indian Ocean coincides with a planned Indian long-range missile test going to held between December 15 and 16 in the Bay of Bengal region by India.
• India had also issued a notification NOTAM (Notice to Airmen), for a no-fly zone over the Bay of Bengal for a possible missile launch with a window between December 15-16, for a maximum distance of 5400 km.
• The presence of Chinese vessel can disrupt the event.
• Debt-diplomacy: China has often been accused of engaging in “debt diplomacy” in the neighbouring countries to India, under its Belt and Road Initiative allegedly in the name of infrastructure development.
• Increased presence in Indian Ocean: Since 2008, China has regularly deployed a contingent of naval warships in the Gulf of Aden and established its first foreign military base in Djibouti in 2017.
• Politicization of Indian Ocean: At the same time, India's absence is seen as an attempt to challenge India’s traditional presence in the region amid apprehensions of politicization of the Indian Ocean region.

The ChatGPT an artificial intelligence tool developed by OpenAI has created a buzz among computer scientists and programmers due to its creative capabilities.

About ChatGPT:

• ChatGPT is a ‘conversational’ AI and will answer queries just like a human would.
  • It can answer follow-up questions.
  • It can also “admit its mistakes
  • It can challenge incorrect premises and reject inappropriate requests.
  • It is being seen as a replacement for much of the daily mundane writing, from an email to even college-style essays.
• Developed by: OpenAI, a research, and development firm, was founded as a nonprofit in 2015.
• Language Used: It has used the GPT 3.5 series of language learning models (LLM).
  • GPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3.
  • It relies on deep learning techniques to produce human-like text based on inputs.’

Why the ChatGPT is called a Language Model and not a chatbot?

• A language model is software that:
  • prints out a sequence of words as output that are related to some words given as input with appropriate semantic relation.
  • It is often used in natural language processing (NLP) applications, such as speech recognition, automatic translation, and text generation.
  • ChatGPT fits more appropriately in this definition and hence differs from chatbots.

ChatGPT as a neural network:

• Neural network: It can be considered as a large network of computers that can fine-tune its output of words based on the feedback given to it during stages of training.
  • ChatGPT has undergone this training process.
  • This training process and the technology together are called Reinforcement Learning.
  • All these technologies are part of artificial intelligence (also called Machine Learning).

How ChatGPT looks at words?

• “Word embedding”: It represents words as a matrix of numbers that can be manipulated inside computers.
  • The context in which a word has been used is differentiated by the neural network mentioned above. Example; shoot appears with the ‘gun’ or appears with the ‘camera’.
• “Transformer”: It is a refining technique that is later on deployed to help a neural network to accurately “understand” the context of a sentence or a paragraph.
  • The output “comprehension” can be used for multiple purposes like answering a question etc.

Development of ChatGPT:

Use of language models:

• ChatGPT follows a generation of language models that were released by OpenAI in 2018.
• In 2018, OpenAI released the Generative Pre-Training (GPT) language, model.
  • Here, generative means that it is a type of neural network that can create new content based on input content, called Training Data.
  • This technology makes it suitable for creative tasks like writing a new story.

Transformer technique:

• GPT was improved and “Generative Pre-trained Transformer 2” or GPT-2 was released in 2019. GPT-3 with even more sophisticated neural networks was launched in 2020.
• In early 2022, GPT3.5 was released and ChatGPT is the successor to GPT3.5.

Accuracy of ChatGPT:

• The accuracy of ChatGPT or any language model can be measured using standard techniques like:
  • ROUGE metric: It is Recall-Oriented Understudy for Gisting Evaluation”. It compares ChatGPT’s output of content against a standard expected content and measures the overlap as a success percentage.

Is ChatGPT the most powerful NLP tool?

• For general purposes, ChatGPT can be considered the most powerful for now.
• However, it may not be equally powerful in specialized contexts, like an automatic conversational assistant for medical queries.

A delegation of Indigenous Amazonians will be a part of the upcoming 15th Conference of the Parties (COP15) for the United Nations Convention for Biological Diversity (CBD), which aims to draw attention on threatening biodiversity loss in the Amazon rainforest.

About the Upcoming COP15 for CBD:

• COP15 CBD is an international meeting bringing together governments from around the world.
• Participants will set out new goals to guide global action to preserve biodiversity through 2030 to halt and reverse nature loss.
• The territories of Indigenous communities in the Amazon have been increasingly reported to be under threat.
• Key discussions:
  • Deforestation
  • Land degradation
  • Biodiversity losses
  • Impacts on Indigenous communities

Significance of Amazon forests:

• Climate science datashow that Amazon basin spreads across millions of hectares in multiple countries and thus play a larger environmental role along with economic gain.
• It hosts massive sinks of sequestered carbonand the forests are a key factor in regulating monsoon systems.
• It harbours rich biodiversityand about 400 known indigenous groups who have prevented commercial from overrunning the lands.
• It’s called the“lungs of the planet” for its role in sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and adding fresh oxygen to it.

Need for Conservation:

• Biodiversity in the region: The Amazon rainforest is home to 30 per cent of the world’s species, comprising 40,000 plant species, 16,000 tree species, 1,300 birds and more than 430 species of mammals. 
• Land degradation: Indigenous lands make up around 20 per cent of the Earth’s territory, containing 80 per cent of the world’s remaining biodiversity.
• Climatic hazards: More than 75 per cent of the Amazon rainforest has been heading towards a tipping point since the early 2000s, a study published in March 2022 said.
• It may be losing its ability to bounce back from extreme events such as drought or fire, threatening to become a dry savannah-like ecosystem.
• Impacting locals: The territory of the Indigenous Kakataibo community of Puerto Nuevo in Peru lost 15 per cent of its tree cover between 2013 and 2021.

Earlier this year, New Zealand recorded the largest-ever sponge bleaching event off its southern coastline.

Now, the latest research shows the most severe impacts on sponges occurred in areas where the marine heatwave was most intense.

What are sea sponges?

• Sea sponges are among the most basic multicellular organisms on the planet. They come in a variety of sizes, colours, and textures. 
• Sea sponges feature a shell-like or glass exterior layer with small pores (ostia) that penetrate deep into the soft interior structure.
• Water can flow in and out of the sponge through these pores. The sponge collects food and oxygen while also releasing waste which serves as food for other animals. These sponges also create tree-like, cup, and tube shapes, creating a forest-like structure. These so-called "sponge gardens." serve as shelter for a lot of other animals. 
• The approximately 8,550 living sponge species are scientifically classified in the phylum Porifera, which is comprised of four distinct classes:
  • Demospongiae(the most diverse, containing 90 percent of all living sponges)
  • Hexactinellida(the rare glass sponges)
  • Calcarea(calcareous sponges)
  • Homoscleromorpha(the rarest and simplest class, only recently recognized, with approximately 117 species)

Important ecological functions played by Sponges

• Filtering water: They filter large quantities of water, capturing small food particles.
• Moving carbon: They help in moving carbon from the water column to the seafloor where it can be eaten by bottom-dwelling invertebrates.
• Maintaining food chain: These invertebrates in turn are consumed by organisms further up the food chain, including commercially and culturally important fish species.
• Habitat for marine species: Sponges also add three-dimensional complexity to the sea floor, which provides habitat for a range of other species such as crabs, shrimps and starfish.

What causes bleaching?

• The sea sponges have tiny organisms that capture sunlight and make food through photosynthesis. The sponges depend on this food for survival.
• When water temperature rises, much like corals, these sponges push out these photosynthesizing organisms.
• In addition to food, these organisms are also a source of their colour. Hence, when sponges push them out, the sponges lose their colour (and turn white) as well as their source of food.